What’s on the markup menu for the restaurant industry?

Among the schema.org tags for marking up web pages is one for restaurants, which includes item properties for priceRange, servesCuisine, place, and menu, among others. Restaurants that use the markup language to structure their data are promised search engine optimization (SEO) benefits when hungry consumers want to see what’s on the menu at moderately-priced nearby Italian eateries, for example. They might also or alternately use the GoodRelations ontology for e-commerce to better accommodate search engines, as well as mobile and desktop apps, with service details of hours, payment options, and daily menus that are accessible in up to 50 languages.

OpenMenu has a value proposition around structured data for restaurant owners, too: Providing increased exposure to Internet, mobile and web apps, via what it aims to be a global and open standard for storing, sharing and using their menus over the Internet. The technical details are described at its OpenMenu.org site. Initially launched in 2010, it recently updated the format to Version 1.6 and currently counts about 75,000 menus as part of its landscape – 5,000 of them actively maintained and growing at a couple of thousand a week, according to CEO and founder Chris Hanscom.

Third-party developers can harness the data too, to build applications that interact with menus, like OpenMenu Search, a way for a search engine to drill down through a restaurant’s information to the menu and menu items.

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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

After a great day yesterday I was eager to to discover what today’s program had to offer.  Unfortunately I had to set off for the airport, where I am now writing this, before the end.  However I caught most of the day and here are my few thoughts and recollections.

Today’s Keynote was in the form of a panel discussing Semantics in the Automotive Industry with Martin [GoodRelations] Hepp, John Kendall Streit of Tribal DDB, William Greenly of AQKA, and François-Paul Servant from Renault.  They discussed their experiences in pioneering the use of Linked Data / Semantic Web technologies and approaches in the automotive domain.
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It cannot be denied that Stephen Wolfram knows data. As the person behind Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, he has been working with data — and the computation of that data — for a long time. As he said in his blog yesterday, “In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains.  But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.”

The main topic of Wolfram’s post is a proposal about the form and placement of raw data on the internet. In the post, he proposes that .data be created as a new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) to hold data in a “parallel construct.”

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Users of Prestashop, the popular open source e-commerce package that powers over 100,ooo shops, now have easy access to semantic markup through the release of a free extension module from Makolab S.A. The extension adds markup from the GoodRelations vocabulary using RDFa syntax to the product item page templates. Read more

[Editor's Note: This week, Juan Sequeda is reporting in from the International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany]

 

The Semantic Web Death Match: Industry vs Academica vs Standards at ISWC this week consisted of 5 panelists and Jim Hendler as the moderator. Each panelist summarized their point of view in a short phrase:

• Martin Hepp (Don’t shoot the messenger: the Fall of Constantinople)
• Michael Hausenblas (Now we have the basement, let’s go for the floors and the roof!)
• Chris Welty (Standards aren’t bad, just misunderstood)
• Ivan Herman (Did We forget about the client-side web applications’ world?)
• Ian Horrocks (Maybe the Web is the wrong application…)

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The first Semantic Technology and Business Conference in the United Kingdom (#semtechbiz) wrapped up in London this week, and there are some themes that emerged from the presentations and networking conversations.

We heard a lot about the benefits of using Semantic Technology solutions. There were strong case studies and experiences shared, and we will be diving deeper into some of these in coming weeks here at SemanticWeb.com.  Sometimes these solutions were in place of — and sometimes in conjunction with — RDBMS databases, spreadsheets, XML files, and other data management systems.  While there was a nice diversity of companies, industries, and products represented, there seemed to be consensus around some of the following benefits of using Semantic Tech for business applications:

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You know Volkswagen as Das Auto company. But perhaps it’s time to start thinking of it as “Das Semantic Web Company.”

William Greenly is the Volkswagen Technical Lead for the auto vendor’s Volkswagen.co.uk online platform at integrated communications agency Tribal DDB. In that capacity he is taking the partnership the companies have had for more than four decades to a new level. His role there has encompassed managing data around Volkswagen’s products, its retailer and web site content, and its interfaces with social networks and many third-party back-end systems, including those germaine to the auto industry such as manufacturer consortiums.

Now, the focus is on using semantic web technology to drive a more elastic, flexible and streamlined digital world for “The Car” company.

The journey began as a strategic brief about contextual search engines serving content based on context within the site and possibly across affiliate sites, a big idea that was quite quickly bound to something more tactical. That being improving site search, Greenly says. “So the objectives were about site search and improving it, but in the long-run it was always the idea to contextualize content, to facet content, to promote it in different contexts.”

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I hate to even mention how quickly Summer is passing, but as we head into August, it’s time to start making plans for the busy Fall event season. September is particularly full of Semantic Tech events.

September 14, in New York City, the Semantic Web Media Summit will take place. A half-day meeting focused on uses of Semantic Web in media, advertising, and publishing, the event is produced by SemanticWeb.com, Lotico.com and our parent company, MediaBistro. With a keynote by Mike Dunn, CTO of Hearst Interactive, and contributions from a stellar group of presenters, the program promises to be a must-attend event for anyone in the New York area interested in how Semantic Technology is changing the media world.  OpenAmplify is sponsoring the conference.

September 21-23, DC-2011, the eleventh International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, will take place at the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague.

Also on Sept. 21, the folks at Schema.org are planning a workshop in Silicon Valley. There are still few details available about this event.

September 26-27, The London Semantic Technology and Business Conference (#SemTechBiz) takes place at the Hotel Russell. This two-day executive conference is designed for business and technology executives who need to learn what semantic technologies are and how to take advantage of semantics in their enterprise and web-based systems. Attendees will further their technical understanding in introductory sessions and learn from the Keynote speakers John O’Donovan (Press Association), Martin Hepp (Hepp Research), Steve Harris (Garlik), and Dennis E. Wisnosky, U.S. Department of Defense.

The Twittersphere is buzzing about the Semantic Web at last grabbing onto the hearts and minds of the whole web community. It started off with a tweet from Juan Sequeda – a contributor to The Semantic Web Blog and a well-known figure in our area – that reads:

 

 

 

 

A follow-up message explains:

 

 

 

Follow that link and you’ll find yourself at a Bing webmaster help site that indicates Microsoft wants to play nice with whatever markup approach webmasters want to implement – microdata, microformats, or RDFa. The site mark-up overview on the page referenced says that Bing’s “crawlers do not prefer one specification over another. It’s entirely up to you to decide which of the supported specifications best fits your data.”

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